About the Indians and Baseball Fandom in General
Some of us forget there are kids becoming Tribe fans for the first time, doing it right now.
They are falling in love with Grady Sizemore, with Victor Martinez, with Ryan Garko. They think the pie-in-the-face routine is very cool. They believe C.C. Sabathia is the best pitcher in baseball, and Casey Blake seems like such a nice, hard-working guy.
For them, this is their first championship, their first trip to the postseason, their first real Indian summer.
They are not wanna-be general managers. They are not consumed by their fantasy team. They don't care that some fans still think the Dolan family is cheap, or the Indians won the Central Division despite manager Eric Wedge.
They just know this season has been fun.
We may be comparing this Tribe team to the powerhouses of the 1990s. Or we may still be upset that Manny Ramirez is in Boston, Jim Thome in Chicago and Omar Vizquel in San Francisco.
Veteran Tribe fans can be very grumpy.
We can hold long grudges about Jose Mesa and the 1997 World Series, about bad trades, about the flop in the final week of 2005 costing that team the playoffs.
But we also can have short memories.
We can forget when we first fell in love with Indians baseball.
If it happened in the 1960s, your Tribe was never closer than 15 games from first place. It had two winning seasons along with seven different managers.
If it happened in the 1970s, your Tribe had two (barely) winning seasons, never winning more than 81 games and never closer than 14 games of first. But it did have six managers.
If it happened in the 1980s, your Tribe again had two winning seasons and five managers, the best year being 84-78 in 1986.
From 1960 to 1993, the Indians never played a meaningful game in September. They never won more than 86 games. In those 34 seasons, they had six winning records and 18 different managers.
We had a stadium where the sinks leaked, the toilets didn't always flush and parts of the old runways smelled like an animal died but no one could find the corpse.
We had one good year of "Super" Joe Charboneau in 1980. We had Larvell Blanks being so upset with manager Frank Robinson that the infielder known as Sugar Bear threw his uniform in a trash can and lit it on fire.
We had Bozo the Clown once throwing out the first pitch. We had deodorant being given out to fans on Mother's Day. We had 70,000 fans for Opening Day and barely 5,000 in the stands for the games the rest of April.
We had a fan screaming "WHO--LEE--OOHH!" whenever Julio Franco came to bat. It seemed to echo across Lake Erie just like John Adams relentlessly beating his drum in the bleachers.
We had stars who deserved better, such as Andre Thornton, Buddy Bell and Rocky Colavito. We had Ken Schrom starting the 1986 opener. We had the dreaded Beer Night riot. We had Rico Carty as the designated hitter, with his wallet in his uniform back pocket because he was afraid someone would steal it from the locker room.
We had everything except a team like this, a team of overachievers -- a team of guys who not only win, but represent the organization and the city with class. We had lovable losers and just some plain old losers.
But most of us never had a team like this when growing up, and it helps to remember that.
It makes me want to see these games and these players through the eyes and with the heart of the little boy watching the Indians with his father many decades ago. Because then we can have a real appreciation of these Indians and what they mean to their young fans.
Column by Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Terry Pluto
I grew up with the 1970s version of the Indians, and kept up, sort of, through the very early 80s. Who knows why kids pick a favorite player? Mine was Jorge Orta (which I'd always heard pronounced "George"), during the two years he was with the team. I think I liked him because he wore number Double-Zero. My Indians included Buddy Bell (I remember my mom at an Indians double-header yelling "Buddy Bell, you're swell!" every time he came up to bat). I remember Gaylord Perry (I remember being surprised to discover that he wasn't a black guy), Toby Harrah, Duane Kuiper, Rick Manning, and Dennis Eckersley. I remember "Super Joe" - and the song they wrote about him - fondly. By the time Lenny Barker pitched his perfect game (about which his grandmother said, "Tell Len I've very proud of him. I hope he does better next time."), I'd pretty much lost interest. I never got to see many games - we lived too far from the Stadium, and back then, most games weren't televised. It was mostly radio. A ballgame on the radio still has a certain charm to me.
But even though we're two thousand miles from Cleveland, my child will grow up watching the Indians every day. Sure, we'll go to Diamondbacks games, but the kid won't really know those players, because we don't watch DBacks games on TV except if they make it to the postseason. Now that you can get out-of-market games no matter where you go, kids are going to wind up being fans of whatever teams their parents like, because those are the teams they'll know best. That means that teams like the Diamondbacks, in a city which is largely made up of transplants from other cities, will always be something of a second-tier team as far as the fans are concerned. At most of the games we go to, a good quarter-to-third of the fans are wearing the jerseys of the opposing team - and when it's a team like the Cubs or the Dodgers, DBacks fans can be outnumbered.
I do wish I had the baby already - given their record, if they win it all this year, it'll be another three generations before they do it again and it's sad that the kid will miss it this time... ;-)